ROLLUP: Crypto Rallies | Gemini vs Barry Silbert | Game of Thrones NFT | Ethereum Liquid Staking | Inflation

2nd Week of January, 2023 ------ 📣 Osmosis | Your Gateway into the Cosmos Ecosystem www.osmosis.zone/bankless http://www.osmosis.zone/bankless ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ 0:00 Intro 3:00 MARKETS 5:40 Ultra Sound Money https://ultrasound.money/ 7:00 ETH BTC Ratio 8:50 Inflation https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/12/business/december-cpi-inflation-report 11:10 Leverage https://twitter.com/YoniJMel/status/1612835719768064001 12:20 Have We Bottomed? https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1613563998426775552 16:30 Markets since 2020 https://imgur.com/qq58Ac2 22:30 DCG vs Gemini https://twitter.com/cameron/status/1612806661508567042 25:00 Shutting Down https://decrypt.co/118533/dcg-hq-shut-down-genesis-layoffs 26:00 Shareholder Letter https://dcgupdate.com/ 29:00 SBF Continued Robinhood: https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1612444676904083457 $5 Billion: https://twitter.com/jconorgrogan/status/1613195331981697024/photo/1 Fraud: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1612458140238225409 Substack: https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-pre-mortem-overview 36:10 Coinbase Layoffs https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/coinbase-to-slash-20percent-of-workforce-in-second-major-round-of-job-cuts.html 38:00 Binance Hiring https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/binance-plans-15-30percent-hiring-spree-in-2023-even-as-rivals-cut-jobs.html 41:00 NEWS 41:45 Arbitrum vs Optimism https://twitter.com/WestieCapital/status/1612837614414880772 43:00 OpenSea Arbitrum Nova https://twitter.com/opensea/status/1611486589087109124 44:20 L2 Bull Market https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1612534516094046208 45:20 Coinbase Rocket Pool https://twitter.com/Jasper_ETH/status/1613318003738697730 47:40 PleasrHouse https://twitter.com/PleasrDAO/status/1613217260511891460 49:30 Instagram NFT Projects https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/01/11/top-nft-artists-are-launching-projects-on-instagram-and-selling-out-in-seconds/ 51:50 Token Gated Lens https://www.theblock.co/post/200859/lens-protocol-now-lets-creators-issue-token-gated-content 53:40 Rolling Stone PussyRiot https://twitter.com/RollingStone/status/1613264584646729755 54:48 Moonbirds Signs with UTA https://cointelegraph.com/news/bluechip-nft-project-moonbirds-signs-with-hollywood-talent-agents-uta 56:00 Vance Spencer Take https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1432774112351375360 57:30 Game of Thrones NFT https://mobile.twitter.com/Niftys/status/1587848208780230657 59:15 Backing USDC https://twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1612087428369498112 1:01:30 BlockFi Cashout https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1612520398892982282 1:03:30 Nexo Rekt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-12/nexo-office-raided-by-bulgarian-police-probing-alleged-crimes 1:11:45 SEC Investigating Saber https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1613264554049282089 1:12:50 Lowest Funding in 2Y https://imgur.com/VWsMSR6 1:13:50 JOBS 1:14:20 QUESTIONS from the Nation Permissionless https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-2023/speakers 1:24:00 TAKES 1:25:00 NFT Brands http://shorturl.at/aCGX8 1:27:00 Rally with Legs https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1612349520234565634 1:28:00 Regretting 2022 1:32:30 What David’s Bullish On https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1613546998984019973 1:33:30 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:35:00 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/0xGhost_/status/1613550278719987713 1:36:12 Moment of Zen https://twitter.com/vertical_dream/status/1612504107516047360 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  The Winklevoss escalate their fight against Barry Silbert and Digital Currency Group, causing Barry Silbert to have to release a letter to investors. Sam Bankman-Fried, our favorite three-letter acronym dude, is doing more Sam Bankman-Fried things, so get ready to face-bomb. Coinbase lays off 20% of its staff while Binance is looking to increase its staff by 30%.

• 0:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the second Friday of January. We're in 2023. I hope you're ready for what are we about to give them, David?

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  The Bankless Friday Weekly. Roll up, Brian, where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into 2023, which so far has been bullish.

• 0:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So far bullish. Numbers are up this week.

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  12 days of green.

• 0:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got some double-digit green, too. We're going to get to that in the markets. Also going to talk about Digital Currency Group versus the Winklevoss Twins. The fight has escalated even further. On Twitter, of course, because where else do modern people fight? Got to be in public, got to be on Twitter. We'll cover that. We'll tell you what's going on there and we'll see if we can draw any conclusions from that. What else are we talking about today?

• 1:09David Hoffman?

  Meanwhile, FTX discovers $5 billion under the couch cushions. Wow, that's pretty sweet. SBF requests access to his Robin Hood shares in order to pay for his legal defense. You'll never guess what happens next. And sadly Coinbase has to lay off 20% of the staff ahead of crypto winter, but Binance is hiring. And then Brian's also going to walk us through some CPI numbers as well, because we got that literally this morning, just a few hours ago.

• 1:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Inflation's deflating, inflation down. So that's, that's good news.

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  Inflation deflation.

• 1:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about that in a little bit. But first, got to tell you about our friends and sponsors over at Osmosis. Osmosis is a Cosmos app chain that specializes in DeFi. David, you want to tell the Bankless Nation about this cool app chain and what it can do?

• 1:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's the liquidity app chain of the Cosmos ecosystem. And so if you ever listen to our episode, "Why Uni Chain is Inevitable," with Dan Elitser, he gave the case as to Why Uniswap will eventually produce its own application chain. Osmosis is the instantiation of that thesis inside of the Cosmos ecosystem. And it is perhaps a place to get started if you are interested in exploring the Cosmos ecosystem. You can bridge right in to Osmosis from Ethereum, Polygon, Binance, Polkadot, Arbitrum, all the, all the highly used places. And you can do some things, the normal things that you would do on any sort of decks. You can swap tokens, but because it's an app chain, you can do some other cool things as well, like liquid staking and other things like this.

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  So if you want to explore the Osmosis universe and the Cosmos ecosystem, there's a link in the show notes. You can go to osmosis.zone/bankless.

• 2:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, David, I wouldn't have said this a year ago, but Cosmos, DeFi on the Cosmos, in the Cosmos ecosystem has really matured. And I think it's worth exploring some in 2023, at least. That's been part of my New Year's resolution. All right, David, let's get to markets. We got the happy music. I hope it's happy because Bitcoin is up. Tell me about it.

• 3:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's, it's up bigly. It's up 8.7%. Starting the week at $16,800, ending where it is right now at a whopping $18,250. 8.7% on the week.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this up on CPI? Is this up on macro? Why are we up?

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, so, so if you look in the far right on the screen, you see that big red candle that goes from like $18,000 down, like 18,300 down to below 18. That was right after the CPI print. So CPI print came out and then it jumped $200, down, down $200 or $300, and then immediately jumped right back up to where it is now at $18,250. But it's been running up all throughout the last week or so, and especially yesterday. This also happened to Ether too. 17, it went from $17,400 and just zoomed straight up to $18,400 inside of like half a day.

• 4:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, crypto's kind of following the market a little bit, I think. I wonder what the correlation looks like right now.

• 4:08David Hoffman?

  You mean trad market?

• 4:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, trad market, stocks and such. I guess just, just more so. Well, maybe this was a disproportionately good week for crypto though, even, even, even though trad markets went up. Okay, what happened with ETH price? That's a big story too.

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ether started the week at $1,250, where it's been hovering around being just like the $1,200 stablecoin for the past like two months. Up 12 and a half percent, all the way up to $1,400. It hit a high of $1,420, which was the high, exact high of 2017, by the way. There's that number again, yeah. Fell down, did the same thing at Bitcoin. As soon as the CPI print came out, it dropped down to 1,350, but is since recovered in that moment back up to $1,400 where we are now. So up 12 and a half percent on the, on the week.

• 4:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  The question David and I are about to discuss in a little bit is, have we bottomed yet? Think about that, listener, as we get to the next section. But first, we'll talk about the ETH to Bitcoin ratio, an important ratio in this market. What's that showing?

• 5:09David Hoffman?

  We are up 3 and a half percent on the week. It's been a very good week for the ratio. It's harder, so like moving the ratio is harder than the dollar. Like crypto prices move very locked versus the dollar, but Ether and Bitcoin, they don't move as much in relation to each other. So 3.5% is actually like a decent move. We are currently clocking in at .076. We hit a high of .078.

• 5:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this is not the ETH of the last bear market, is it? This is a totally different ETH.

• 5:41David Hoffman?

  Different, different.

• 5:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think we can see it here. Here's ultrasound money. A number you and I were looking at earlier in the week was the supply change since the implementation of EIP.

• 5:53David Hoffman?

  Down 1,000 ETH in a week!

• 5:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so over the last 120 days, guys, ETH has only increased in its total issuance, total supply. And this is of course selling pressure by 2,000 ETH, right? It's not ultrasound, it's not deflationary at this point, but only 2,000 ETH versus what it would normally be and what it was in the previous bear market. We would have added 1.4 million ETH supply. And what does that equate to? David, run some numbers for me. What does that equate to in terms of uh?

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  Um, basically rounding up slightly to $2 billion.

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  $2 billion of sell pressure just eliminated.

• 6:30David Hoffman?

  We did not have.

• 6:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that was in last bear market. No wonder ETH went all the way down 94% and uh way underperformed Bitcoin. Different ETH, different asset completely. And so I'm actually not surprised to see the gains on the ratio here.

• 6:46David Hoffman?

  Let's zoom out on this chart really quick, if you don't mind. Let's go out, let's go out really, really.

• 6:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  How far do you want to go?

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  Oh, now, now the candles are getting super tiny.

• 6:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  These Kraken charts could do anything, so we can uh.

• 6:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if listeners are wondering, the sexy new interface is the Kraken Pro new interface. Uh, Kraken Pro has really got a cosmetic upgrade lately, so thank you for Kraken.

• 7:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Glorious.

• 7:04David Hoffman?

  For serving us these ever important prices. I mean, so we have a lot of time left to start filling out these, this bear market candles. Uh, there's probably, I'm, if this follows the like last bear market, we're just a lot more volatility still has to leave. We're just gonna like find a bottom.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at this over here, right? Yeah. Chop back in 2018.

• 7:23David Hoffman?

  But I mean, if you compare those two peaks, like you can kind of tell we're at the tail end of uh just like the, the depression of the, the peaks.

• 7:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think we're here?

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  There was this maybe, like there was that one moment uh back in like June, July of 2018 where like Ether and Bitcoin started to flatten out. Like I think Bitcoin was flattening out at 6,000, Ether was flattening out at like 300. And they're like, okay, fine, we established a bottom. And then the bottom fell out and we went down like another 50%. Um, so if we are trying to say that this is the same as last cycle, then that would still be ahead of us. But I don't necessarily think that that's ahead of us.

• 8:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think that ETH is a different asset this cycle. And it might be more apt to compare ETH to Bitcoin of previous cycle than ETH to ETH of previous cycle. I don't know if that uh draws any insight, but like I was just looking earlier. So ETH is down 71% from all time high. Bitcoin is down 73% more than ETH. That's certainly not the case last bear market where uh Bitcoin was surviving and doing okay when Bitcoin was, or ETH was completely getting destroyed.

• 8:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very interesting. Okay. What about total crypto market cap? We're got to be below trillion.

• 8:37David Hoffman?

  Above 900 billion. So we are finally back above 900 billion. We are at 919 billion dollars.

• 8:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  It's been a while since we've seen a nine there.

• 8:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is. Let's talk about the inflation numbers. They came out earlier this week. They were good. December inflation report. The headline is consumer price gains continue to cool. Here's the chart for you. David, do you see this kind of spike for inflation? This is a fully zoomed out chart all the way from 1965 all the way to 2023 where we are now. And we're down to 6.5% inflation for December.

• 9:12David Hoffman?

  A low, low number of 6.5%.

• 9:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it peaked in June, 9.1%. And ever since, we've been going down, down, down. Last month that we saw a report, November was 7.1%, now it's 6.5%. The reason the market reacted favorably-ish to that was because it was just exactly at what was predicted by the market. The street was saying 6.5%. We came in at 6.5%. This, of course, is still well above the Fed's mission, which is a 2% inflation rate. Maybe they'll increase that to 3%. That's what some are saying. Powell's holding firm that the target is 2%.

• 9:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then of note, of course, before the pandemic, before all of this chaos that you see from 2020 onwards, inflation used to be 2.1%. It used to be the most boring number in all of finance because for the last like decade or two, it's always been like 2%, never changed, quite volatile these days. What do you think? Are we, are we done with inflation?

• 10:17David Hoffman?

  So we just recorded our podcast with Tyler Cowen, which comes out on Monday. And he mentioned that we really need to see three months in a row of decreasing inflation to really feel okay-ish in confidence about the trend here. And he was, and we recorded with him a few days ago. And this was the print that we were looking for to see if it would continue to trend down for three months in a row. And it is, I think, and so he He said, "Three months is what you need to start having some amount of confidence." So I think we are in the earliest stages of being able to have some amount of confidence about a downwards trend. And I think every single month after that, where we continue to print lower, we're just gonna start stacking on the confidence and the confidence and the confidence. And that's really what it takes for risk appetite to come back.

• 11:01David Hoffman?

  And so we are on to the first of many boxes that are checked, but it is the right step in the right direction.

• 11:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's switch back to the crypto cycles again. So some people are saying there was a lot of leverage in the system. Quite obvious, built up in 2021 and 2022. And now that leverage is gone. It's been washed out. It's been flushed down the toilet. Bye bye, Three Hours Capital and all of the margin traders that got completely wrecked. This is a tweet from Jack. Do you wanna tell us what he's saying?

• 11:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Jack is saying, "Over-leverage was the theme of the year. It was really the theme of the entire bull market, being over-leveraged. But how much leverage remains in the system this year?" He asks. "Despite major blowouts from incumbents like FTX, Bitcoin liquidations are down significantly in the second half of 2022, suggesting that the majority of leverage has been washed out." And that's probably also why we're seeing a lot less volatility in crypto asset prices, is that leverage is volatile. Leverage adds to volatility. And now that like things are stable, there's less incentive to take leverage because you can't really trade as much in this market. But you're just seeing a lot lower liquidations, both on the long and short side, meaning that we are in a much more healthy, much more grounded phase in the market,

• 12:15David Hoffman?

  which implies that we are closer to a bottom than we otherwise would be if we had a lot of leverage.

• 12:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's just flat out ask the question. I did on Twitter, "Has crypto bottomed?" This was a results poll. Forty-four percent said yes. Fifty-five percent, point three, said no. So kinda split.

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  Pretty even.

• 12:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pretty even. I call that even. A little more saying no. What's your answer to that? Have we bottomed yet, David? Have we seen the all-time lows of this cycle?

• 12:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, when we hit below $800 Ether and like below $16,000 for Bitcoin, that I don't think we're going back there. Like Bitcoin got or Ether got down to $870 or something like.

• 12:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is the question. Do you think we bottomed?

• 12:58David Hoffman?

  I don't think we're going below that.

• 13:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that was in your predictions.

• 13:01David Hoffman?

  I think I think you're still like cautiously worried about a three-digit Ether and I still don't think that's gonna happen.

• 13:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't. I don't necessarily think we'll go below the 800. This is like 800 something. I can't believe remember what the bottom tick was for ETH, but I mean, I that that's something really bad would have to happen.

• 13:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it would have to be another event.

• 13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, go back and look how strong ETH is from a from a supply perspective, right? It would have to be something that utterly shakes the confidence of existing holders. I can't actually think about what that would be.

• 13:38David Hoffman?

  It would have if like Coinbase would have to go insolvent or Binance would have to go insolvent or something like that.

• 13:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I really do feel like and we'll talk about this a little bit later that the digital currency group piece is the last bit of contagion. That's really where we ended the year and that still feels kind of to be the case. But can you make, you know, so.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  Ether bottomed at $880, by the way.

• 14:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am also going to, I guess I'm making things less interesting by agreeing with you, but like, I'm also going to say crypto bottomed. Now, that doesn't mean we're not in for a lot of chop and a lot of stagnation and this whole apathy phase ahead. I still think that's in store. But can you make the steel man, the argument that crypto has not bottomed yet? What would somebody who's still bearish on crypto say? What do you think would be their their main arguments here?

• 14:30David Hoffman?

  I'm not going to be very good at this. There's the you had the complacency bottom. First, we had like the leverage and flush out bottom, which we think happened. And then you were talking about a complacency bottom or like, sweet, now crypto is going to be boring for like two years in a row. And people are going to be frustrated that nothing exciting is happening in the crypto markets. And then like in two years, people are just like, this is. Boring, I'm out. There's opportunity elsewhere. And so people sell for the complacency bottom. That marks the actually the beginning of the next bull market. I think there's that, but I don't, again, I don't get much credence to that. And then, and then there's like, there's actually more contagion that we really know about. When DCG, it's totally going to go under, they're going to sell everything that they got.

• 15:12David Hoffman?

  That's going to put a lot of sell pressure into the market and that can do another round of cascading liquidations for over leveraged players. That would be the other case. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 15:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that I, I, I think that would be the steel man argument. It's just that there's this, um, this apathy drop and it's gradual and it's over time. And that's in the, it's basically in crypto, if there's nothing new in crypto, that means down by default. There's nothing new, people lose interest, it's down. And so you kind of have to bet that nothing new is going to happen. Apathy will, will creep in over the next year or two. David, I gotta say, I can't get behind the case that nothing new is going to happen in crypto. And there's so much building going on. There's so much excitement. I mean,

• 15:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's a big difference between last bull market or last bear market and this bear market. Cause like, there's so much energy in pockets. There's, there's pockets of very strong energy, like the Arbitrum ecosystem. I've been hanging out with the, uh, the, the treasury ecosystem, the smallurs. They are, they're crazy dude, they're nuts. They have so much energy. And like they're, they're, and during the 2018 to 2020 bear market, like it was just like you and me and DC investor and Anthony Cisano and Moloch out. And we were like, and Moloch out was like the most interesting thing that we had. There was, it was just like, hey guys, uh, how's your, how's your week going? Anything new with you?

• 16:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eat this money, right?

• 16:33David Hoffman?

  Eat this money, right guys?

• 16:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a chart you put together and this is kind of a commentary on, um, on the cycle and where the, the, the last cycle actually topped. Can you explain what you're showing here, David?

• 16:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is a little bit of a messy chart, but that's because I had to layer the same charts upon each other over and over and over again. But so the only thing that is uniform about this is time. Prices are not uniform, of course, but all time lines up. And so we've got the Solana, the Luna, the Polygon and the Ethereum charts. Solana is the main one that you see in purple. Luna is the gold one that's kind of invisible, but it's different color. So you can kind of see it. And it's also the one that goes to zero in May of 2022.

• 17:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just look at the shape, guys.

• 17:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, look at the shape. Yeah. And then there's Polygon, which is like the cyan color. And then there's Ethereum, which is the normal CoinGecko blue color in the very background. And you can kind of just see the progress of the bull market go on. It was, we've said it before, it was Ethereum's show for the all of 2021 and then the first half of 2022. And that is where I am like hovering my cursor over it right now. You can't really see it because my cursor is white. Yeah, Ryan's got it. That, that, that peak right there, that was, it was Ethereum's bull market. And that's also when gas fees hit like $600 and people, newcomers were like, I'm so excited about crypto, but I can't use Ethereum. What else can I do? And that's when Solana started its bull run. It's also when Polygon started its bull run.

• 17:59David Hoffman?

  And so then that's when Solana hit all time highs at around the same time Ether hit all time highs, $4,000, like $900. Solana hit its all time highs of like something like 250. And then Polygon, not, or excuse me, Luna, not too long after that, a few months after that, hit its all time highs and then went to zero immediately after hitting all time highs. I just think it's a nice way to kind of do an audit as to how these markets progressed.

• 18:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this is what Vance Spencer Spencer called everything after something like April or May of 2021 is, was the low conviction rally. Yeah. Right. So we had, first we had the high conviction rally that you see kind of up to here. And I felt like that lasted through kind of like March of 2021.

• 18:43David Hoffman?

  And that was a lot of like bear market OGs like us saying like, everything that's happening right now makes sense.

• 18:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh dude, I remember for, for months before I would just tweet out on the regular like, Ether's stupidly underpriced.

• 18:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And I just hit like, it's still stupid. It's 300. It's still stupid. Like I would keep doing that. And I kept tweeting until about Now that I recall, until about like ETH was above 1,000 until like March of 2021. And I stopped tweeting that, right?

• 19:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, that felt real to me. Everything after this was like narrative, clearly a lot of margin. It was a lot of like, kind of greed. It was the market getting carried away. Wait, they call this the exuberance phase. This is not, this is not particular to crypto. This happens in every single market where human psychology is involved, which is all markets. And so I don't think the market was very honest past April of 2021.

• 19:41David Hoffman?

  Past $2,000 Ether, which it hit in like April of 2021, I think is when we got carried away with leverage as an industry. And that's exemplified by the fact that Ether goes from $2,000 to $4,000 inside of like six weeks. And then it crashed from $4,300 down to like $1,700 from May to June of 2021. And that was, that was the first indication that like hindsight 2020, that this market is now based on leverage. Everyone is taking leverage. This is now a full blown casino.

• 20:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's no coincidence that now, if you want to buy ETH, you're paying like first quarter 2021 prices, basically. Because that was back to the time when the market made more sense in the pre-leverage time. All right, Dave, we've got a lot more to talk about, other than markets, of course. What's coming up next?

• 20:29David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, the Winklevii escalate their fight against Barry Silbert and Digital Currency Group, causing Barry Silbert to have to release a letter to investors. Sam Bankman Fried, our favorite three-letter acronym dude, is doing more Sam Bankman Fried things. So get ready to facepalm. Coinbase lays off 20% of its staff while Binance is looking to increase its staff by 30%. So all of these conversations and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors to help you go bankless. Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Kraken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Kraken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro,

• 21:13David Hoffman?

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• 21:58David Hoffman?

  How many total airdrops have you gotten? This last bull market had a ton of them. Did you get them all? Maybe you missed one. So here's what you should do: Go to Earnify and plug in your Ethereum wallet, and Earnify will tell you if you have any unclaimed airdrops that you can get. And it also does PoApps and mintable NFTs. Any kind of money that your wallet can claim, Earnify will tell you about it. And you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire. And if you sign up for Earnify, they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again. You can also upgrade to Earnify Premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets. And for just under $21 a month, it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop. So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you get.

• 22:41David Hoffman?

  That's E-A-R-N-I dot F-I. And make sure you never lose another airdrop.

• 22:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here it is, Digital Currency Group versus Gemini, round two, round three, round four. I don't know what round we're in, David, but I do know. Okay, Cameron Winklevoss tweeted another open letter out, this time to the board of Digital Currency Group, which of course the board appoints the leader of Digital Currency Group, which is the CEO, Barry Silbert. It seems like there is definitely a feud going on. I don't know, David, if you want to pull out any colorful quotes from this open letter. I will say the TLDR is Cameron wants Barry fired. He says he's unfit for duty. Basically, and that the board should, he's proven himself, he's a quote, unfit to run DCG and unwilling and unable to find a resolution with creditors that is both

• 23:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  fair and reasonable. As a result, Gemini, acting on behalf of its 340,000 Earn users, wow, that's a lot, request that the board remove Barry Silbert as CEO effective immediately. Wow, shot across the bow. Actually, that's more than a shot across the bow. I mean, that's a direct shot.

• 23:48David Hoffman?

  That's a criminal charge from Cameron Winklevoss to Barry Silbert. And what the things that if you read this full thing, it's actually pretty interesting. He's basically saying that Genesis gave Gemini and Gemini Earn information that made them believe that Gemini was totally solvent. And that was only true based off of misleading and fraudulent statements and accounting fraud.

• 24:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cook the books.

• 24:13David Hoffman?

  Cook the books, yes. And so whether or not this is true or not, we'll, we'll take an investigation into Grayscale and into Barry Silbert. But that's kind of what Cameron is saying this is what we need because we, as operators of Gemini Earn, feel rugged because of misleading and fraudulent statements as of Barry Silbert and Genesis and Grayscale. And so he's documenting all of these things that he is claiming is true about Genesis and Barry Silbert and putting this into a letter which he then released on Twitter.

• 24:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's also some righteous indignation here because it's not, it's not just Cameron and Gemini, but he keeps talking about retail. You know, 30, 340,000 Gemini Earn users who effectively are out of money. Their, their money is locked in digital currency group. So he's kind of shifting that onto DCG. Not all is healthy in DCG world as well. So what is this headline?

• 25:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So there is a wealth management division out of DCG that is shutting down. And this actually isn't news. This was released as intention from Barry Silbert not too long ago, but parts of the digital currency group are winding down. Genesis is actually laying off a bunch of staff. And so they're doing a bunch of cost cutting coming up for the Crypto winter and of course they have that hole in their balance sheet that everyone knows about. So in the digital currency group side of things, they are just doing kind of the same thing that everyone else is doing, which is trimming the fat, cutting costs, retracting for the winter. And so that's kind of par for the course. Barry Silbert, however, did release a in letter to investors, a letter to shareholders of Digital Currency Group.

• 25:55David Hoffman?

  And this came, this was basically in response to Cameron Winklevoss, although not actually officially in response. But like, you know, you read between the lines, it's like this is being sent out.

• 26:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  To his shareholders technically, but he's.

• 26:08David Hoffman?

  Yes, but it's been definitely inspired and motivated by being charged with fraud by the Cameron Winklevoss. So he starts off the letter saying, first, I'm incredibly proud of the role that DCG and I have played as pioneers and builders over the past 10 years. He then goes on to list a bunch of accomplishments from DCG. He says, I have fond memories of the early days of our industry, working hard to educate, fighting in the trenches with fellow entrepreneurs and investors, looking to gain legitimacy for crypto.

• 26:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny because he's been here for a while. I mean, so have the Winklevoss twins, but so has he.

• 26:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he, he continued and he's kind of like, kind of trying to prop himself up. It's like, hey, I believe in everything that I've done. I'm an OG. Yeah, I've been here working in the trenches.

• 26:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this line, speaking at conferences to rooms with three people, getting snickered at on CNBC, right? He's like, I am deep crypto.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  He then continues, in contrast, the past year has been the most difficult of my life, both personally and professionally. Bad actors, repeated blowups wreaked havoc on our industry with ripple effects extending far and wide. Although DCG, our subsidiaries and many of our portfolio companies are not immune to the effects of the present turmoil. It has been challenging to have my integrity and good intentions questioned after spending a decade pouring everything into this company and the space with an unrelenting focus on doing things the right way. So this is, this is the part that's like basically the response to Cameron Winklevoss saying, I am offended that I'm being charged of these things. And there's a, he then finishes this letter saying, I hope this letter and the accompanying Q and A, there's a Q and A in this, in this letter, which we don't have time to go into, but it's linked in the show notes.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  That explains other developments and addresses some of the speculation about DCG, some of which is reasonable and some of that is completely basis and false. Hopefully this helps clarify our position. So that was Barry Silver's response.

• 27:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't know the full truth yet, right? The easy answer, it would seem, is if everything's going OK, can't you just give the $900 million back to Gemini earn customers? I'm sure it's definitely not that simple, of course. But we do know authorities are definitely involved. So DCG is being investigated right now by the DOGA and by the SEC as well. So I'm sure the truth will emerge.

• 28:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but specifically, the report says that neither Genesis nor DCG has been accused of any wrongdoing. So they are investigating and the Department of Justice is investigating, along with the SEC, DCG, and they have said that they are not charging Genesis or DCG with anything of wrongdoing. They're just taking a peek.

• 28:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It just feels like we're kind of in the he said, she said moment of things where like, one of them's probably right, or there's some truth in the middle, but we just don't know yet. We don't have kind of all of the facts in this case. So I don't think this will be the last time we talk about DCG, but the last domino has not fully fallen yet. David, what else we got to talk about?

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, you know, our good friend SBF. So there's no real rhyme or reason to these flow of stories, so we're just going to go through them one by one. First up, the most comical one. SBF seeks access to his Robinhood shares worth about half a billion dollars, 150 million, because he needs to pay for legal fees. So SBF was like, hey, can I have some of my money so I can pay for legal fees? Guess what happened, Ryan? Just a few days later.

• 29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 29:24David Hoffman?

  The United States government seized the Robinhood shares.

• 29:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 29:28David Hoffman?

  So the answer to that question was no. No, you cannot have.

• 29:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're ours now.

• 29:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're ours now. Thank you for that half a billion dollars. In other parts of the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle, I guess is when you.

• 29:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Titanic.

• 29:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah. They found, FTX has found over $5 billion of what they call cash, liquid cryptocurrency, liquid investment securities, and measured at the date in question. So the recent times. They found money. They found $5 billion, they say. That's the change in the couch you were talking about. Yeah, exactly. The $5 billion have changed. Have you looked in your couch cushions lately, Ryan? You might find $5 billion. Importantly, in this memo that they've released, it doesn't, they do not ascribe any value to the holdings of dozens of illiquid crypto assets, which are holdings that are so large relative to the total supply that our positions cannot be sold without substantially affecting the market for the token. So they're saying that like, they're not, they're not counting the illiquid tokens that they can't sell. And still $5 billion.

• 30:26David Hoffman?

  Which implies that, wow, that's, that's $5 billion real dollars. We're talking 40%, 50%? People are not buying this. People are not buying this. And so this is a tweet from Connor, who I'm not familiar with, but he just says, $5 billion, question mark, I went through every wall that I could find that FTX owns. The biggest positions are 700 millions of Sol, mostly locked, 575 million of FTT, 371 million Maps. FTT does not count. Sorry. A bunch of millions of dollars of other tokens that I'm not familiar with. $90 million of WBTC. Maps, Oxy? Maybe they know something about that we don't. And maybe they know Ethereum addresses and other addresses that we don't. But if these are the addresses, then that $5 billion is questionable.

• 31:10David Hoffman?

  So we are unsure. I think the jury is still out as to how much money was actually found. All right, well. In fantastic FTX fashion. So the same Connor Twitter account says, my simple model is that the estate, the FTX estate, wants a win and good publicity to talk about all the progress they've made. In my opinion, this $5 billion number vastly overstates what they could sell in an open market and improperly sets creditor expectations of a high percentage of asset recovery. Don't give us hope yet. Don't give any of the creditors hope. It's probably a lot worse than that. But they were very clear. We have located $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency, and liquid investment securities. That's a very clear statement.

• 31:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was very clear. Yeah, I hope that would be backed by something more than we saw in those tweets. This is a tweet as well coming out. This is breaking as of earlier this week. Prosecutors are telling lawyers connected to SBF, the fraud investigation case, that the case is so sprawling that it could exhaust resources of the Southern District, since it includes potential bribery, count them, that's one, campaign contribution violations, two, market manipulation, three, on top of theft for and fraud. That's a lot of things.

• 32:22David Hoffman?

  That's a lot of things.

• 32:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  That it could exhaust the entire Southern District's ability to actually prosecute these things. Someone I think called this a DDoS attack.

• 32:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I bet you if you scroll down, you'll see Nick Carter. He's like, oh, the old legal system, DOS attack, denial of service attack. That's like a loophole inside of the universe. It's like if you can do so many illegal things that the court system can't finance itself to sue you, you can get away with a portion of them. I mean, you're still going to jail for life, but they're good with some stuff.

• 32:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, yeah, exhausting an entire district's capability to prosecute you. It's crazy.

• 32:59David Hoffman?

  You are so incredibly illegal that an entire district doesn't have the money to sue you.

• 33:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this happened too. SBF just tweeted this out. It's a link to a Substack. SBF has a Substack apparently now.

• 33:11David Hoffman?

  Brand new, yeah.

• 33:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the title of this article is FTX pre-mortem overview. And Sam just gives a complete overview of what happened.

• 33:20David Hoffman?

  An audit from his perspective. I was skimming through it to see if there was anything new. But I think it was just like a documentation of all of the stuff that he's been saying on Twitter Spaces and all like.

• 33:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what it was to me? Because I haven't watched all the Twitter Spaces. It's just like shifting blame, right? Like so, basically, the first, the first, second sentence here. At the end of the day, FTX is just somewhere between that of Voyager and Celsius. We're not that bad in between Voyager and Celsius. Okay, look at all these. There's a lot of that conversation about being not as bad as Voyager, Genesis, Celsius, BlockFi, Gemini. It happened to all of us, all as a group. There were comments about down here, David, you know, about how crazy the market actually was, the 2022 market crashes. He goes in this narrative and he says, then, over the course of the year, markets crashed again and again and again.

• 34:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Alameda reportedly fails to sufficiently hedge his position until summer. Bitcoin crashed 30%, Bitcoin crashed another 30%, Bitcoin crashed another 30%. And then he lists all of the things that happened in 22. I'm like, yeah, it's freaking crypto. What the hell?

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  He doesn't know that, dude.

• 34:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you new?

• 34:30David Hoffman?

  Sam Bakman Fried, yes.

• 34:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  The genius boy trader is new?

• 34:34David Hoffman?

  He's a first cycler. And like, he was born in an up only paradigm.

• 34:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, earlier in this, in this, he was bragging about, and I don't know if any of this is justified, but something about that, that like Alameda on the book should have had enough reserves to sustain a 94% market crash. I'm like, 94%? I mean, we've had those before, you know?

• 35:00David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, like if you-

• 35:02David Hoffman?

  That's what you should expect.

• 35:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the base case. That's not the worst case. That's exactly what you should expect.

• 35:09David Hoffman?

  Especially when you printed a bunch of funny money, bro.

• 35:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was perhaps the most detached statement in the, the whole note that I read. He said this, "I believe that had FTX International been given a few weeks, it could have likely, it could likely have utilized its illiquid assets and equity to raise enough financing to make customers substantially whole."

• 35:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  He, even now, he says, "I believe that if FTX International were to reboot, there would be a real possibility of customers being made substantially whole." He still thinks, he still says he thinks that.

• 35:43David Hoffman?

  This goes back to our conversation last week where like one take is that SBF actually thinks he's innocent and a good guy trying to do the right thing. I think he actually does think that.

• 35:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've just given an incredibly diluted person like billions and billions of dollars and he continues to be diluted.

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  Diluted, yeah.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, what, what a lesson for crypto.

• 36:05David Hoffman?

  I'm sorry.

• 36:07David Hoffman?

  Sorry.

• 36:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. What else we got, David? Our third news item this week.

• 36:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Sad news out of Coinbase. They are cutting a fifth of its workforce. They also cut 18% of their staff last June. So just overall, big contractions in Coinbase employees. But I think this is, this is par for the course. This happened last bear market. This is just what it takes to be on the frontier of growth. That means that when the bull market comes, you lay people off. It's not like a mistake. It's not like a misjudgment as to crypto. It's just like, oh, the bear market is here. We have to cut, we have to cut costs. As a result of all these layoffs, Coinbase says that this is bringing down their operating expenses, down by 25% for the quarter ending in March. The company will also be shutting down several other projects with, quote, "a lower probability of success."

• 36:56David Hoffman?

  This article continues with like general commentary about the tech sector. And it says Coinbase joins a chorus of other tech companies cutting jobs after going on a hiring binge during the COVID pandemic. Last week, Amazon said it would cut 18,000 jobs. Salesforce reduced its headcount by more than 7,000 jobs, which is 10%. Elon Musk slashed half of Twitter's workforce after taking the helm of CEO. Meta, Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs, about 13%. And also crypto companies Genesis, Gemini, and Kraken also reduced their workforces. The last line I'll read here is, "Every company in Silicon Valley felt like we were just focused on growth, growth, growth, and people were almost using their headcount number as a symbol of how much progress they were making."

• 37:39David Hoffman?

  Armstrong, Brian Armstrong, said, "The focus is now on operational efficiency. It's healthy for the ecosystem and for the industry to focus on more on those things." This, to me, is just what a bear market is. As prices go down, as things contract, you operate on efficiency rather than growth.

• 37:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are cycles. Things grew too fast and now they. Came down fast and that's what's happening. Although, although David,

• 38:03David Hoffman?

  although.

• 38:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Binance is bucking that trend.

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's that headline.

• 38:08David Hoffman?

  Or posturing at least, at the very least, to say so.

• 38:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  True. Crypto exchange Binance plans a 15 to 30%, not cut, hiring spree this year in 2023, even as rivals slash jobs. That's what CZ is saying, that they're focused on hiring and they're going to hire another 15 to 30%? What do you think about this?

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah. CZ says that Binance needs to get the company well organized ahead of the next crypto bull run and admitted that the exchange is not super efficient. Yet who wants to hire more?

• 38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Might be some posturing. I don't know. Show strength. There's, there's.

• 38:44David Hoffman?

  We've, we've definitely seen CZ posture before. Remember when we had him on, on Bankless? And, and it was, we were like, oh, the question we had was like, CZ, SBF and FTX are buying everything under the sun. Like, what are you doing? And CZ was like, uh, Binance has first, first digs on everything, on everything.

• 39:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's buying, he's buying our leftovers.

• 39:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he's buying our sloppy seconds. Yeah. So there's definitely some posturing out of CZ that we've definitely seen this behavior before. So far, it has not been inaccurate.

• 39:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And yet we don't know. We don't know one way or another, do we? But, but CZ has definitely been, been kind of hard to unsee as the number one exchange. So praying for Binance's solvency. All right. What do we got coming up next?

• 39:31David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, optimism takes the number one spot of transaction volumes across Layer 2s. And OpenSea integrates Arbitrum Nova, which is Arbitrum's gaming chain into the OpenSea marketplace. So the L2 wars are hot and everything is good for Ethereum, of course. NFTs had a crazy week. Pleaser Dow is working with Edward Snowden. Rolling Stone Magazine is working with Pussy Riot and Game of Thrones launches an NFT. It's not great. Get your facepalms ready because it's going to be funny. So all of that and more as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets. Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange, but you know this because you've been listening to Bankless.

• 40:16David Hoffman?

  But did you know that the Uniswap web app has a shiny new fiat on-ramp? Now you could go directly from fiat in your bank to tokens in DeFi inside of Uniswap. Not only that, but Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism Layer 2s are supported right out of the gate. But that's just DeFi. Uniswap is also an NFT aggregator, letting you find more listings for the best prices across the NFT world. With Uniswap, you can sweep floors on multiple NFTs, and Uniswap's universal router will optimize your gas fees for you. Uniswap is making it as easy as possible to go from bank account to bankless assets across Ethereum, and we couldn't be more thankful for having them as a sponsor.

• 40:55David Hoffman?

  So, go to app.uniswap.org today to buy, sell, or swap tokens and NFTs.

• 41:04David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum One is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One, producing flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. With the recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social dApps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum One and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitrum Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community,

• 41:46David Hoffman?

  dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free.

• 41:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we're back. The flippanting no one was talking about. Optimism overtakes Arbitrum for daily active addresses and transactions per day. So this is Arbitrum still leading on total locked value. So it's kind of like an assets on the chain sort of measure. But optimism leading on transactions. What do you, what do you make of this, David?

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, this is just momentary. It's optimism taking the lead. We'll see if they can sustain it. I think, I don't know how to read into this too much. There's a lot of more like analysis that really needs to go into why optimism is getting more transaction volume. But I think it does lend itself a little bit to the philosophical differences between these chains. Arbitrum is very, very DeFi heavy. Optimism and the optimism team are always really focused on like, literally, how do we build a new world? Like a new governance structure, new organizational systems, new economies. And so the fact that the economy of optimism as a governance system, a two house model and all of the, and all the real DeFi and NFT stuff's going on,

• 42:57David Hoffman?

  that kind of tracks versus Arbitrum, which is more like DeFi and NFT and kind of.

• 43:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess Arbitrum is just getting more finance use cases at this point?

• 43:07David Hoffman?

  Maybe, yeah. We'll have to get bent on it. I think we should get bent on why on this, like what about, what's new in the optimism ecosystem? But those charts, the trend here, if you're looking at the screen, the optimism transaction volume chart is just like solid, rock solid up into the right. Arbitrum had a big wave and it's slowly come down since a peak. I bet you these things will leapfrog over and over and over again.

• 43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's, it's really interesting to see these economies emerge. OpenSea is now supporting Arbitrum Nova. What does that mean, David?

• 43:38David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum Nova is Arbitrum's second chain. So the first Arbitrum chain is called Arbitrum One, because it's the first chain. Arbitrum Nova is the second chain. It's a chain dedicated to social and gaming. And so it's like a roll up, but with off chain data. So there's other data dependencies. Your data is not stored on Ethereum. It's stored with what's called a data availability committee, which is a committee of data providers that are not Ethereum. So there's different dependencies there. But what do you get from that? Super fast and super cheap. And so this is Arbitrum's gaming chain. And now Arbitrum has two chains that are integrated inside of OpenSea. So just big progress, big progress.

• 44:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that is big. What do we got here, David? You're calling this the L2 bull market. Why?

• 44:25David Hoffman?

  This is just a list of very green numbers of transaction volume across Ethereum and all the Layer 2 chains. So in the last seven days, 58% increase in transactions on Optimism, 42% increase transactions on Arbitrum 1, Immutable, 47% increase, DYDX, 113% increase in transactional volume. Now, if you look at the numbers, the actual numbers are Ethereum 13.7 transactions per second, Optimism 7 transactions per second, Arbitrum 2.5, Immutable 2.5, DYDX 2.5. So like, still actually low numbers. But these are just actual, these aren't capacities, these are what is actually being used. And so the volumes are up,

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  but still have a lot more to go. I expect things like Optimism, Arbitrum, Immutable to definitely pass because they have the capacity to definitely pass Ethereum in transaction volumes. I expect that to happen this bear market.

• 45:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was interesting, too. It looks like Coinbase is maybe becoming a Rocketpool O-Dow member? Why would they do that? So Coinbase has its own Ethereum staking service, of course, internal, but they are also going to be working with Rocketpool?

• 45:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we, Bankless, is an O-Dow member for Rocketpool. Sazil Anthony Sazano is also a new O-Dow member to Rocketpool. What is the O-Dow? It's called the Oracle Dow. Rocketpool just needs the Oracle price for Ether. They just need to, as a part of the system, they need to understand what the price is for Ether, and so they get that through the O-Dow. So people that are trusted and also put up a bond to, to report the Oracle price of Ether to Rocketpool. Coinbase is now being proposed as an O-Dow member, and so this is-

• 46:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  That doesn't mean they're going to stake any of their, any customer funds on Rocketpool.

• 46:19David Hoffman?

  That is not what that means.

• 46:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it does mean they're getting involved in the project.

• 46:22David Hoffman?

  Exactly. And I think that's really the important point to take home. It's like, the O-Dow membership for Coinbase is them- Getting their foot in the door because now Coinbase has O Dow like governance, if you will, as in like they are part of the system. I think it's the first way that Coinbase becomes comfortable with staking through Rocket Pool. And if you've been in the Rocket Pool trading channel and inside of their Discord, it's like one of the most high energy channels that exists.

• 46:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they probably think this is incredibly bullish and that this means Coinbase staking is imminent.

• 46:50David Hoffman?

  This has always been one of the theses of the bull case for Rocket Pool. It's part of the DeFi mullet thesis or the protocol sync thesis, which is something that we've been hammering into people's heads for as long as we can. Centralized companies can use decentralized protocols for their services. And if Coinbase just stakes through Rocket Pool, they actually can make more money than if they just run their own nodes themselves. It's profitable for them to stake through Rocket Pool. And so I think this might be an early indication of that thesis playing out.

• 47:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  That could be cool. I mean, that would be amazing. We also see like, how much better would it have been if BlockFi, for example, and Celsius and all of the other centralized lending companies used something like Ave or Compound.

• 47:37David Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 47:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rather than kind of these centralized providers for it. That is DeFi mullet as well. All right, let's talk NFT stuff, David. So the NFT community seems full of life. This is a new announcement by Pleaser Dow. Can you explain what this is?

• 47:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And also disclaimer, I'm a part of Pleaser Dow. Pleaser Dow is working on a web three auction house. And so an auction house for the metaverse is at pleaser.house. That's pleaser without an E. In collaboration with Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. Do you know who Daniel Ellsberg is, Ryan?

• 48:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't. Who's Daniel?

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  He is the whistleblower that released the Pentagon Papers that started to actually turn the tide of the Vietnam War for releasing a lot of the back channel comms in the Pentagon. That was like, hey, the Vietnam War is like totally illegitimate. That's Daniel Ellsberg right there. And so Pleaser Dow bought the Edward Snowden piece, the NFT that Edward Snowden made that was about

• 48:37David Hoffman?

  His whistleblower for the NSA, they bought that for 4 point something million dollars. We bought it and that's an NFT that is inside of the Pleaser Vaults. And now that the Pleaser Dow has created this auction house, Daniel Ellsberg is making an NFT, kind of how Edward Snowden did, and is going to be auctioned out off today in a few hours. So yesterday for listeners, hopefully it goes for a lot of money because all of the money is being donated. 50% is being donated to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is also where all of the money for the purchase of the Edward Snowden NFT also went, the 4 plus million dollars.

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  And then the other 50% of this Daniel Ellsberg auction is going to the Daniel Ellsberg's like personal foundation for also donations. So I think that's really cool.

• 49:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very cool. Yeah. And I think you did a show about, I haven't caught up with that show, but it's on Bankless with Jameis.

• 49:32David Hoffman?

  Jameis, yeah.

• 49:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Talking about that. NFT artists, did you know they are launching on Instagram these days?

• 49:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a headline from CoinDesk. So top NFT artists are launching projects on Instagram and they're selling out in seconds. This, to me, David, is somewhat detached from crypto native world. So I don't necessarily see what's going on in these communities. But if you'll recall, Meta and Instagram added NFT functionality. At first they were able to kind of view NFTs. Now apparently the ability to mint and sell NFTs. And they're, they're selling like crazy. I don't know what we're looking at this specific one here.

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  That looks like a weird NFT to showcase, but okay.

• 50:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, here's another one from Sandeep. So a lot of these are based on Polygon, of course. This is one called Accutars, I believe.

• 50:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, what's interesting about this is there seems to be still appetite for NFTs. It's in a new platform on Instagram.

• 50:32David Hoffman?

  Excuse me, Ryan, they're digital collectibles, sir.

• 50:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Digital collectibles. And what's interesting to me too is Meta is taking like 15 to 30% of the proceeds from these sales.

• 50:43David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And creators are still doing it. So. Bullish? Question mark? Bullish digital collectibles at least, not NFTs, of course. Those are bad.

• 50:53David Hoffman?

  I think it's gonna be stuff like this and the combination of Instagram and the branding digital collectibles. People are just gonna get it. Like, oh, this is a digital collectible on the internet? That's a cool technology.

• 51:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  When my tribe does it, it's cool. When your tribe does it, I hate it.

• 51:11David Hoffman?

  Well, sure. Yeah, your NFTs are dumb. Your NFTs on OpenSea are dumb. My digital collectibles on Instagram are great.

• 51:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Amazing. Why? Because it's from my favorite creator and this amazing fan community. And like, yeah, it's totally tribal, isn't it?

• 51:24David Hoffman?

  I think this is just like the technology of Ethereum slowly working its way into corners of the internet that already exist. This is, again, the protocol sync thesis playing out. And this is also going to unlock new creators and new communities to have digital collectible powers. And we're not going to hear about it on crypto Reddit or crypto Twitter. Like, it's gonna be new communities and that's gonna be part of the vision of how this whole revolution happens.

• 51:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. Don't even know if they're using crypto has always been the, always been the vision. Lens Protocol is letting creators issue token gated content. So what do you make of this, David?

• 52:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is just following into the footsteps of other platforms that we see in the space like Mirror. Any sort of content can be turned into a token and be created. But also, they're creating tools for token gating. So posting inside of Lens's token gating application, all that content becomes encrypted and only made accessible to users who meet certain conditions, having a certain amount of reputation, holding a certain token, being a certain, I don't know, thing or person.

• 52:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really smart, right?

• 52:32David Hoffman?

  It's so simple.

• 52:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like the idea, you know, Twitter rolled this thing out. I don't know if I've even seen it in use, but the idea that you can subscribe to different Twitter accounts, basically, as kind of a premium service and just receive their, their premium only tweets. Substack has a similar model in that, you know, they'll send out free posts and then premium posts. Well, Lens is just doing like, Token gated posts, right? Because none of these previous Web 2 platforms are doing token gating yet. They're just doing simple subscription payments. And I think that creates a whole new incentive model. It's really smart of Lens to do. It's like a Web 3 native feature that only they can do.

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  I really wish I could tweet out and have a tweet only be read by people with a certain like NFT, for example. So if I wanted to tweet out to all my MFers to be like, no, don't show this tweet to anyone who doesn't own an MFer.

• 53:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 53:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that'd be really cool.

• 53:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  That'd be really cool. Or like just the bankless community. Imagine there was a bankless NFT.

• 53:29David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God. Could you imagine?

• 53:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are bankless badge, badge tokens, of course, which are like our PoA badges.

• 53:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we did NFTs before it was cool.

• 53:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, digital collectibles, actually.

• 53:40David Hoffman?

  Well, no, ours are NFTs. Ours are NFTs.

• 53:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, ours can be NFTs. What's going on with Rolling Stone, Pussy Riot? What's happening?

• 53:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Rolling Stone Magazine is working in collaboration with Nadia, AKA Pussy Riot, AKA the dissenter who made a bunch of fun of Putin and then got kicked out of the country. And so just in the same vein as Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellis, Pussy Riot is selling NFTs on the Coinbase NFT platform in collaboration with Rolling Stone. So we got some two ETH bids for a collection of, I think, 11 or 12 of Pussy Riot's pictures. If you don't know who Pussy Riot is and you're looking at these pictures for the first time and you're like, what the fuck? That's a normal reaction. That's kind of the point. That's kind of her brand. I've hung out with Nadia a few times. She's, she's deep in the crypto world. She's also a member of Pleaser Dow, actually. She's, she is a hoot to hang out with, let me tell you.

• 54:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  She's DM'd me before. I've never connected with her, but she listens to some bankless, doesn't she?

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  I think so, yeah.

• 54:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless, okay. All right, we got Moonbirds.

• 54:41David Hoffman?

  She has a necklace that she wears all the time and it's just a dude, big penis. It's a penis necklace.

• 54:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fantastic.

• 54:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you didn't know that.

• 54:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blue Chip NFT Project Moonbirds signs with Hollywood Talent Agencies. What is this about?

• 54:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know much of this world. Was it United Talent Agencies? Yeah.

• 55:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 55:02David Hoffman?

  United Talent Agency is, I think, like a massive deal in Hollywood. It's kind of like the guild of actors. Maybe it's like a little bit of a monopoly. I don't know. But Kevin Rose and the Moonbirds have signed a deal with United Talent Agency to just promote the Moonbirds brand. And so what does UTA bring to the table? This is from the article. They are 1,400 people with divisions in film, television, music, video games, sports, books, branding, licensing, speaking, marketing, fine arts, broadcast.

• 55:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a network of influencers, like all... Is that what it is? I'm asking a question, actually.

• 55:36David Hoffman?

  I don't know. They said their job is to vet, broker, and execute partnerships and expansion opportunities across a variety of fields. It's to help promote the Moonbirds brand on a global scale and just trying to get out of just being recognized as a big brand inside of Web 3. This has, I learned, also already been done by both Larva Labs and Yuga Labs. So this is not a first in the NFT industry.

• 56:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got to do it ethically with full disclosures, though, as Yuga Labs learned, I think, recently. This is Vance Spencer's take on it. What does he say?

• 56:09David Hoffman?

  This is a Vance Spencer take from back in the day when Larva Labs did this deal in the first place. This was August of 2021, so over a year ago. This was raised by Luke on the bank side of things, who used to work in Hollywood before we totally poached the hell out of him. And so Vance Spencer says, "The Larva Labs-UTA deal is great, but the bigger vision is to create IP with open licensing APIs where anyone can use the IP for anything. Example, UTA goes out of business and Larva Labs stops calling the shots." But then Vance finishes and says, "The blockchain unlock will be moving IP licensing from scarcity to abundance mindset." And so I think this is really the early conversations of the decentralized bottom-up brands.

• 56:52David Hoffman?

  And these are kind of the NFTs that I really like, like MFers, for example, is a decentralized... Centralized headless movement of branding. Whereas, uh, Moonbirds in Yuga Labs and Larva Labs, anyone who's signed a deal with UTA is like, "Hey, UTA, make our brand better." Like ascribing agency to an, to an agency to make the brand better. Versus MFers, just go wild, make infinity derivatives, just be MFers. Like, there's two different styles there.

• 57:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just anarchy versus like top, like sexualization, right? And like, I don't even know what's more effective.

• 57:23David Hoffman?

  I think case by case, facts and circumstances. Yeah, each one's probably got its own facts and circumstances.

• 57:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, I know that this, I guess this is not an effective NFT. Well, I mean, at least for me, uh, Game of Thrones NFT, the Build Your Realm experience, brought to you by Warner Brothers. Uh, so we now have Game of Thrones NFTs, as if the show didn't already jump the shark. Now they're getting on the NFT bandwagon.

• 57:50David Hoffman?

  Wow, Ryan does not have good things to say about Game of Thrones.

• 57:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, I mean, what do you think of these NFTs, David? Do you have good things to say about them, uh, any takes here?

• 57:59David Hoffman?

  So I think what we're looking at here, if you go back to the marketplace, these are like packs, like card packs, like if you open them up, there's like five of them. If you hit filter in the top left.

• 58:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 58:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so, yeah, so here are the animations of the people of Game of Thrones. And man, does it look like a cheap mobile game.

• 58:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow. Did you see, did you see this tweet here, David?

• 58:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it's this funky donk saying, "I bought this for 0.07 ETH. Why might you ask? Do you hate yourself, funky? No, it's because I know art when I see it and these fingers, that's art." And so we are looking at an animation of this guy who's like, it's definitely some junior animator who's got some crazy spindly, like, two feet long fingers that's attempting to grab this spear and it's just like missing and the animation's all bad. Uh, and this, it's, it kind of feels like a Kevin moment. You remember Kevin, of course.

• 58:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I remember Kevin.

• 58:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  But how are they selling, David? That's the most important thing.

• 58:57David Hoffman?

  They sold out, dude.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, they did. How do they still sell out? They're even calling them NFTs.

• 59:03David Hoffman?

  I don't know.

• 59:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  People, who's buying these things?

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  I don't know. But apparently, so there's a game that goes with these things, apparently. So there's like utility. Maybe they can, maybe they can fix the animations.

• 59:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, maybe David and I are missing out on these fantastic NFTs. You know, art is completely subjective.

• 59:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. What is backing a USDC? This is a tweet from John Paul Coning, who really follows stablecoins quite well. It turns out that 30% of USDC is actually BlackRock government money. So BlackRock bonds, I believe, and this is up from 0% in October. So it happened really quick from 0% to 30%. That's about $13 billion of USDC reserves. Those are, that's the funds, the collateral that backs the coin USDC. When you use it on Ethereum or any network is actually managed by BlackRock. What do you think, David? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

• 1:00:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  BlackRock bad? BlackRock is a bank and so we shouldn't want them in crypto? What's happening here?

• 1:00:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So John continued this thread and gave a take that I think I agree with. He goes, "Since the proportion of USDC reserves invested in the Circle Reserve Fund has risen to about $28 billion." He says that this is likely a win for USDC users because Circle is yielding some control over USDC's reserves to an external manager subject to SEC regulation, which ultimately makes USDC safer. Transparency improves since users can now get regular updates from BlackRock. And BlackRock is like a, you know, like a TradFi-approved institution, regulatory-approved.

• 1:00:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mega institution.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  Mega institution, right? And so it's basically an extension of the state. And so using a BlackRock as like a vehicle to put USDC inside of is what he's saying is like, this is just a good use of transparency tools and protections for users. And ultimately, USDC is already an extension of the state anyways. It's dollars in a bank, so it doesn't make it any more centralized. So I think this is just layers of protection around companies that are very much the opposite of FTX, if you will.

• 1:01:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I think it's definitely regulatory protection too. Because now that the, someone like the SEC looks at Tether. And they're like, no, uh-uh. And then they look at USDC and they're like, ah, okay, BlackRock, our friends, the incumbents. We know these guys and they're okay with USDC. I think that's what's probably going on.

• 1:01:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was kind of disturbing and disappointing to me, David. This is Ben Hunt talking about BlockFi and specifically some of the leadership of BlockFi having cashed out during the last year or so. Do you want to read this out?

• 1:01:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is after we got a report, a transparency report from BlockFi and equity holders and the cap table. So apparently Ben went down this rabbit hole to just look at the data and he goes, tweets out on Twitter, CEO Zach Prince cashed out 9.3 million from his BlockFi account, about 70% of his account in early April 2022. This was right before the Luna, Three Ours Capital contagion. And then he cashed out another $850,000 in mid-August 2022 after BlockFi got bailed out by FTX. I think it was actually Alameda. And he says, he follows, yes, I'm accounting for market declines in the assets. And so cashing out 7, 9.3 million dollars before every other contagion happened, you know, I think you

• 1:02:33David Hoffman?

  can kind of give him the pass on that. Cashing out almost another million dollars after getting bailed out by FTX is a

• 1:02:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't feel great, does it?

• 1:02:43David Hoffman?

  Not so great, not so great. Yeah. It's like, it's like the cost between like, that is his money. He's totally, that's his money. He's able to withdraw. He's able to press the withdrawal button and get the money.

• 1:02:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's withdrawing from his own product, though, his own

• 1:02:56David Hoffman?

  Withdraw, yeah, it's like lack of confidence of your own

• 1:02:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a vote of no confidence, right? And that in the second piece, especially in mid-August, right? And even the first piece in April, I mean, BlockFi, I guess it was prior to contagion.

• 1:03:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I mean, an informed person might be able to understand the writing on the walls. It's like, is, like, he would be able to see like how solvent BlockFi was or not. I think it's hard to not give him a pass on that one, but it's still, it's still, you

• 1:03:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't feel great.

• 1:03:24David Hoffman?

  Doesn't feel great.

• 1:03:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  When a whole bunch of people lost money in BlockFi specifically.

• 1:03:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the leader didn't.

• 1:03:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, speaking of C-Fi, Nexo Office was raided by Bulgarian police in a wide investigation. What is going on with Nexo, David? This was breaking as of, I think, this morning.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  So yeah, this was kind of crazy. This is out of Bloomberg. Crypto lender's office in Sofia was raided by Bulgarian police on Thursday as a result of an investigation into suspected money laundering and tax crimes. More than 300 police officers, prosecutors, and national security agents are taking a part in this operation, which was stated from the Bulgarian chief prosecutor who told reporters in Sofia. Nexo used to operate inside of the United States, but like a few months ago, they closed down their operations because probably, I'm guessing what happened was the SEC was like, hey, that's a security, and they just didn't want to fight it. So they just went offshore, started to be like some smoke out of Nexo.

• 1:04:26David Hoffman?

  The article continues saying, "Authorities are investigating London-based Nexo on suspicion of money laundering, tax crimes, and offenses involving unlicensed banking activities." Kind of all the same thing that I think the SEC was worried about.

• 1:04:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nexo put together a tweet thread, which was kind of like a defense of themselves. You know, I skimmed through this, and the trouble with this, David, is you just really don't know who to believe. Looks like this tweet thread was centered on AML KYC, and maybe they're kind of implying that's the reason that they're under investigation, I suppose you'd call this. But they said that they've always been abiding by the laws. Now, David, at this point in time, I don't, you know, we're hearing things whenever something like this breaks, you're hearing kind of a bank run types of murmurs, right? But we haven't actually seen anything to indicate that that people are unable to withdraw their funds.

• 1:05:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:05:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, that could change quickly.

• 1:05:25David Hoffman?

  The knee-jerk reaction is Nexo is insolvent, they don't have any money. But that's not what's being reported. What's being reported is tax fraud and banking violations.

• 1:05:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 1:05:34David Hoffman?

  I mean, where there's smoke, there's might be fire, and I know, and I would suggest if you have money in Nexo to probably withdraw it. But I haven't seen anyone say, hey, I have money in Nexo and I can't get it out. I haven't seen any report like that yet.

• 1:05:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have seen some things on Twitter of critics saying, hey, Bankless, why did you ever do anything with Nexo in the past before? I think we should probably talk about that and address that. Bankless listeners, longtime Bankless listeners, might remember a stint that we did with Nexo as a sponsor of Bankless. They actually booked a podcast sponsorship slot for the entirety of last quarter of Q4. We cut them short after about six weeks of this when there started to be some fishy stuff going on in the general SeFi space.

• 1:06:20David Hoffman?

  Nothing by Nexo.

• 1:06:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing by Nexo. We met with them. We told them, hey, we don't feel comfortable, given everything that's going on with FTX in continuing this partnership. And we sort of, we cut them off there and then. I will say retrospectively, and we've kind of talked about this in general, partnering with Nexo at that time in Q4 was definitely a mistake, right? I think that our feeling going into it was not all centralized lending companies are bad. There are some good ones, aren't there? There have to be. Nexo had just come through the gauntlet of Thero's capital getting destroyed and BlockFi getting destroyed and Celsius getting destroyed.

• 1:07:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they were actually like talking about acquiring other companies.

• 1:07:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:07:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It felt like a reasonably safe, like if you go in with eyes wide open and you understand that giving up your private keys means giving up your coins, but you're willing to do that, you do your own due diligence. It seemed like they might be able to make it. And look, they still might. But I've got to say, this doesn't make me feel good that they have been associated with the Bankless brand. Like, you don't like to see one of your, one of the sponsors of your podcast being raided by the police.

• 1:07:40David Hoffman?

  For tax and money laundering? Yeah, not great.

• 1:07:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. So even though the scope of their ad was like short and very limited, I gotta say, I mean, I think you and I have talked about this and we regret it. We wouldn't do it again. I mean, I think there are some lessons learned in sort of all C-Fi lenders coming out of 2022. And it's something that like, very few of them are on solid ground, if any of them are on solid ground. I will say, if you kind of zoom out and look at the discernment we've had on sponsors, just in general, I felt pretty good about our discernment with picking sponsors up until this point. You know, like, this is an industry that's incredibly hard to navigate, right? Like, you know how we end every podcast

• 1:08:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  with like, crypto is risky, you could lose everything? Even picking sponsors, like, we don't know which ones might have smart contract bugs, or shady founders. We try to do our best. In this case, I think this was a probably a big fat fail. And I definitely regret it. And so apologies to anyone we may have let down with this one. You could tell, like, David and I are not perfect. We do try our best. We hope and we think that the good outweighs the bad generally on bankless. I would take this one back if we could. And I hope you guys know, we're not going to get everything right on bankless, but we're going to continue to do our best. I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that, David?

• 1:09:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just trying to put myself back into the shoes that we were going into Q3, Q4 2022, was when we signed on Nexo. Like, of course, the taste of centralized borrowing and lending desks weren't, was not good at that time. And so like, it was, it was a conversation that we had, like, is this the right sponsor? And using the calculus of like, well, Nexo wanted to buy everything that Celsius would give them, before they got outbid by FTX. And so to me, that was like, oh, that's, we just went through the acid test of who was over leveraged and who was responsible. And Nexo kind of seemed like the responsible one. So now that we have more information, turns out that that was incorrect.

• 1:09:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was so crazy about it is David's, like, all of them failed.

• 1:09:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like not one of them.

• 1:09:55David Hoffman?

  That's the unreal thing is like not one borrowing and lending desk made it through 2022. They all blew up.

• 1:10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I was hopeful that there would still be some kind of good guys there that were able to make it. And there just haven't been. Anyway, we are leveling up. We're learning from this experience. I think as an industry, we're learning from this. Do not expect us to support any centralized lending companies in 2023, probably ever again, unless we get some sort of proof of reserve system down. And we are being much more discerning. We're not going as fast when it comes to sponsor selection and we're adding some new due diligence to the process.

• 1:10:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I think the last thing I'll say on this is like this whole 2022, like aside from like centralized companies blowing up, was a massive lesson for, I think for all of the industry and definitely me as well, is the combination of just like, well, interest rates are very, a very big deal, as it turns out. But also the idea of like how toxic yield is when it's like paired with a borrower on the other side. And but that's like, you know, there's all, there's a bunch of borrow, money markets are a thing in TradFi and they totally work in TradFi too. But it's the combination of like money markets, you know, Gemini Earn, Genesis, like all that stuff. And then on what is downstream of that, which I did not appreciate until after all of this contagion happened, was like thousand APY pool twos and funny money printed out of thin air.

• 1:11:18David Hoffman?

  And basically the entire bull market, which was just like high yield and funny money. And then I went, all of those pool twos dried up and went to zero. Like that just slowly worked through the system and it doesn't, it didn't really matter how responsible you were as a, as a money market. It was, there was too much hot air in the entire industry. And so every single centralized lender, lender went and solved it. And that's just like a lesson in economics that me and I think the entire industry learned this year.

• 1:11:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, speaking of which, I guess, as we're talking about investigation.

• 1:11:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is this guy? I remember him from some time last year, but the stablecoin exchange Saber is under investigation by the DOG as well. Who's this guy? Ian, I believe his name is, and Dylan, are they twin? Are they brothers?

• 1:12:07David Hoffman?

  Yes, I think they're brothers. Yeah, we reported on this a while ago. You remember the story of the one or two Solana developers that spun up and sock puppited like 12 different DeFi apps on Solana and it triggered a bunch of TVL and it was like responsible for like-

• 1:12:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It got lost in all the scams last year. I'm sorry. I just forgot this one.

• 1:12:26David Hoffman?

  Yes, right. This was the one developer who was actually like 11 different pseudonymous developers that created all these like financial interlocking protocols that doubled in crypto, triple accounting, counted crypto deposits and it like inflated the Solana TVL by like 40%. That guy, that guy, those two brothers are the, that's what we're talking about. Those two brothers are under investigation. So, surprise.

• 1:12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. All right, David. One note on races, of course, is that startup funding levels are now their lowest in almost two years. So, VCs is about a 75% drop from last year in terms of funding activity. Look, I think that's a very healthy thing because the private valuations in crypto that were out there and that we were seeing were absolutely crazy. And so they needed some cooling down. And I think this is bullish and also not surprising. You have anything more to say on that?

• 1:13:25David Hoffman?

  The numbers here is that VC firms invested 2.3 billion in crypto startups during this last quarter. It's a good number, not a bad number, but that is a 75% drop from the same period previous year. So like, one interpretation is like, oh, VC funding is totally dried up. I think that's actually the wrong angle. You should say like-

• 1:13:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gotten healthy.

• 1:13:44David Hoffman?

  VC funding was insane a year ago. And now it's, now it's just healthy.

• 1:13:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was bad now and now it's much better. Speaking of which, there's still investment going on in crypto and there are still jobs to be had in crypto. In particular, Bankless is hiring. We are looking for a director of business development, got some sales experience. Come on, talk to us. Also Uniswap Labs, Senior Software Engineer. WebAC is Software Engineer of Adapts. WebAC also a QA Analyst. You can find these jobs, you go to bankless.pallet.com/jobs. All right, what do we got coming up next, David?

• 1:14:19David Hoffman?

  We're going to get into questions from the Bankless Nation. And this is coming out of the Bankless Nation Discord, which, Ryan, did you know that we completely revamped the structure of the Bankless Nation Discord?

• 1:14:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I did know that. It's looking pretty good. The conversation's hot. What's going on? What's the talk of the Discord this week? And by the way, how do people get into that Discord? Because you can't just click a link, right?

• 1:14:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there will be one soon, but there is a link in the show notes. If you want to go into the Discord channel to ask Ryan and I questions, because every single Wednesday before we record this episode on Thursday, we go into the Weekly Rollups Questions channel. We at everyone and say, hey, what questions do you want us to read out on the Weekly Rollup? And so there's that, there's that channel. There's also a bunch of other channels. Like I said, we completely reorg them. So there's a lot of vitality being injected into the Discord. And so, Ryan, are you ready to get into questions?

• 1:15:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so the first question is from Walshy. Walshy says, "The first crypto conference I ever went to was Permissionless." I guess that was last year. "Sorry to ask you, somewhat chill your own conference." I'm so glad you asked. "But I had an absolute blast. It was my first real Web3 social experience. Everyone I met was so warm and the vibe is best described as welcoming and galvanizing. I learned so much by following your advice and taking as many people as possible to all of the talks and booths and meetings and everything else. What could we expect from Permissionless V2 in Austin later this year?" And where, so it's in Austin. When is Permissionless V2 and what can people expect, David?

• 1:15:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Permissionless 2023 coming in hot in September 11th through 13th of 2023. That's this year. So you got eight more months to come. It's gonna be a lot bigger. The biggest take I heard was when I told people that Permissionless was a first-year conference last year. It was like, what? Which is, I'm super proud of that fact. And I know the Blockworks team feels similarly. So, I mean, the second round of Permissionless, Permissionless 2023 is just gonna be that much bigger and better because it'll be our second time doing this. So we got Eric Voorhees locked in as a keynote speaker. We got Mary Catherine Lauter from Uniswap. We got Justin Drake, of course, coming back. Hazu's coming in. Donnie's coming in. Zach Emanion's coming in. And we're just, you know, we're eight months out.

• 1:16:36David Hoffman?

  So we haven't locked in even all like the big super chat speakers that we really want to, which is to say nothing about how Chad Eric Voorhees is. And so I'm super stoked for everything that we're gonna do. There's also this year going to be a hackathon as well. And so that is the shiny, sparkly new thing out of Permissionless. There's going to be a hackathon leading up to this, which I'm pretty stoked for. And there's one thing that I think people should appreciate about hackathons. They're pretty considered, they're considered dev-oriented, right? These are developers to go compete for prizes. But a hackathon with a non-dev person who can communicate extremely well, who can make a pitch deck, who can present, a non-technical person, I mean,

• 1:17:17David Hoffman?

  is super appreciative. And devs kind of, often devs need somebody to do that lift for them. So if you are a non-technical person, but you want to get involved in like, very big projects come out of hackathons. Earnify, which is now called Bankless Labs, came out of a hackathon. So there's a lot of opportunity there. And in addition to the actual conference, which is gonna be some great talks, I'm sure Ryan and I are gonna moderate a ton of them. There's the hackathon, then there's also the side events. There will, of course, be the Bankless meetup. We are organizing for the Inner Circle, for the Bankless Nation Discord. If you are in there, if you're a premium member, we're gonna organize a meetup at ETH Denver. We'll be doing the same thing in At Permissionless in Texas and also tickets are going on sale every single week.

• 1:18:02David Hoffman?

  A new batch of tickets is going out, actually just went out. Prices go up every two weeks, so the longer that you procrastinate and don't get your ticket, the more that you pay more money. So you can go, if you know that you want to go to Permissionless in September, definitely get your ticket now. There's a link in the show notes to get that done.

• 1:18:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  The way that makes the most sense to get that ticket is to upgrade Bankless Premium, by the way. And when you do that, you get part of the, you get into the Discord we were just talking about, and you also get 30% off that ticket. So it kind of pays for itself.

• 1:18:32David Hoffman?

  Bankless Premium pays for itself because 30% off of Permissionless is more than a year's of Bankless Premium.

• 1:18:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  The next question is, with people in crypto companies having PTSD from all the cascades of liquidations, will people be less inclined to take such leveraged risk next time? I hope the answer is yes, but at the same time, I wonder if that will make the next bull run less explosive. What chance do you think there will be a next bull run that does not bring new all-time highs? Are we going to get a muted bull run? Are we ever going to see all-time high again? What do you think about that, David?

• 1:19:04David Hoffman?

  And this question is from Yeti77. Thank you for the question. I think people will totally ape right back into leverage as soon as the bull market comes back. Part of the fact that we are not in a bull market, part of the fact that like prices are more stable, they're less volatile, they're also lower, is a symptom of people taking less leverage. Because when people take leverage, they mint money out of thin air, and then they use that money to buy crypto assets, and that makes the crypto assets go up in price. And so the fact that people aren't doing that is why we have settled down to these new lower prices of $2,400 or $1,400 Ether and $18,000 Bitcoin.

• 1:19:45David Hoffman?

  We're kind of monkey brains. People that participate in markets are using their reptile brains. And so as soon as people get bullish, people are not going to be able to think rationally. They're going to ape right back into leverage. Some of them will be able to make money, many of them will not.

• 1:20:02David Hoffman?

  But what does the chance that the next bull run does not bring new all time highs? Depends on what crypto asset you're talking about. I won't consider it a bull run until we do reach new all time highs, however. And the fact, the idea that ether and bitcoin won't reach new all time highs again, I ascribe 0% chance to, 1% chance for bitcoin.

• 1:20:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's basically if that happens and kind of crypto is dead. It's just like, if you believe, it's going to hit another bull run. Like the contrary bet to all of this is like you betting against fundamental human nature. Right? To think that another bull market won't play out like the last, you know, three or four in crypto, it'll play out similar. There will be some differences. It could be longer. There could be different highs or lows, but like fundamentally, we're just looking at fractals and we'll see the exact same fractal play out in the, in the next bull market. And if you, if you think that we won't hit all time highs, it's kind of because you think crypto has already peaked. Is that zero? And if you think we peaked at how

• 1:21:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  many, 150 million people around the world that own crypto, how many people are in DeFi right now? I mean, the population of a large city, I don't know, maybe five to 10 million, something like that. Like it's relatively small. If that's our peak, wow, I would be blown away, surprised. We are just scratching the surface. We're still in this early adopter phase. So you have to be patient. Here's the thing. This market will also test your, your, your faith or your belief in that, because you'll see some jumps and then it'll hit something and it's not quite all time high. And then you'll go back down and there'll be apathy for like weeks and months. And be like, oh, maybe it was all over. Maybe Bankless was wrong about this. Maybe the thesis is not playing out how I thought.

• 1:21:47David Hoffman?

  Ether isn't going to 10K, oh no.

• 1:21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, maybe none of those things. It's you just have to be patient is the thing. And yeah, that's coming from somebody who. We've been through a couple of these cycles. I felt these same things. I asked that same question that you're asking last cycle. And I guess I just, I feel like I know how it's going to play out for the next cycle. Not exactly, but I'm making the bet for sure. David, we got another question from Zen Mode. How do you think the Shanghai upgrade will impact LSD narratives? ST ETH dominance versus our ETH is the question from Zen Mode here.

• 1:22:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is definitely in vogue in conversation in the Ethereum land is like, all right, when withdrawals are unlocked, what's going to happen? Like, what are the narratives? I think we were talking a little bit about this last week. Lido has a ton of ETH that is locked in its vaults that becomes unlockable. And so we are going to see how much of that Lido staked ETH gets withdrawn, how much of that withdrawals goes into other liquid staking derivatives like Rocketpool, Stakewise, maybe centralized providers, hopefully not. And so like, that's like Rocketpool's super hungry for some of Lido's ETH. Like, if you're a Rocketpool bull, you think that that's going to become your staked ETH inside of Rocketpool. And the

• 1:23:07David Hoffman?

  only reason why it's not already is because we haven't enabled withdrawals. And so these, the people are like, you know, they're all chomping at the bit to get to eat at Lido's Lido's Ether. And Lido's probably like, you guys aren't going to get any of my Ether. Like, these are, this is my Ether. You're not getting any of it. And so this is really like, the fight that's going on right now.

• 1:23:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I just wanted to find some terms for people, right, to make this a little 101. How do you think the Shanghai upgrade? Shanghai is an Ethereum upgrade that is probably coming the end of this quarter or early next quarter, that will enable people to unlock their staked ETH. Okay, so that's what the question is asking. Will impact LSD narratives? That is liquid staking derivative narratives for two specific protocols. That is liquid staked ETH and liquid staked Rocketpool ETH. Liquid staking is basically just like, once you stake your ETH, you have the ability to then use that staked ETH as a token. Do other cool DeFi things. You can hold it in your wallet. You can trade against it. So it's actually fully liquid. It's not staked. It doesn't feel like it's locked anymore.

• 1:24:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a token representation of that stake. And I do think you're right, David. It's just, we've talked about this on Bankless. This is kind of a snow globe moment for liquid staking, which is like, you're going to shake the snow globe again. And then all the kind of the, the snowflakes are going to just fall in different places. I don't think it's going to be just down to these two, right? Lido versus Rocketpool. You mentioned a couple of new entrants. I'm aware of a slew of new entrants.

• 1:24:42David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of startups. Some are in stealth mode. Some are about to shift to mainnet.

• 1:24:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  They all know this date and they're hungry and they know the market's going to reopen. After the Shanghai upgrade and they're chomping at the bit. So, uh, big opportunity here is why people are excited. The games are just beginning. That's right. All right. Speaking of which, David, let's get to some takes of the week. Are you ready for the first one?

• 1:25:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:25:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Take of the week. This is from Lal. I will read the tweet out. Lal says, "There are a dozen or so Nike swoosh level memes that could emerge from independent crypto artists in the next decade. Artists leveraging the power of Creative Commons IP and immutable tech to compete with behemoth institutions. Here are a few in the running at this time." What are we looking at here?

• 1:25:28David Hoffman?

  So these are the Noggles, the Nouns goggles, the Nouns glasses. Absolutely iconic. They were in a Super Bowl. Coming up next, I actually don't know what this one is. This is-

• 1:25:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cat with a shadow? Not iconic for David and I yet.

• 1:25:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know what that is. This is an MF'er, which I'm a huge fan of. And this is ex copy, right? So these are some of the very identifiable, very decentralized headless brands. And this kind of goes back to the conversation about the talent agency out of Moonbirds versus a headless brand like MF'ers. I'm a big fan of the headless brand movement. I think MF'ers-

• 1:26:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's new.

• 1:26:03David Hoffman?

  I think they MF'ers are so iconic and so recognizable that calling them the decentralized Nike swoosh brand of Web 3, I think is a great take. And that's why I put it in here. Look at that guy. Look at that guy. He's so cute. He's just being a little MF'er, you know? Just like, mindin knows his own business, duping around on his computer.

• 1:26:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's cool about this is unlike, unlike the swoosh, right? No one owns it, right? I mean, Nike owns the IP of the swoosh and they're gonna do the contracts with all the athletes to plus up the swoosh and make it cool. It's up to these communities to kind of do that. It's just a completely fundamentally new model that, um, do you remember the take of, um, the professor we had on a week or two ago and talking about copyright? Yeah, Brian Fry. He's basically like, NFTs may kill copyright. You may not need it any longer. And, um, you know, if, if he's right about that, then I definitely think something is going to emerge as a Nike swoosh, probably even bigger. Uh, Chris Berninski says, if I had

• 1:27:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  to guess, this rally has legs. People were so downcast near the bottom that lots are probably poorly positioned, may end up chasing it. They can't, if they can't take the FOMO, doesn't mean we won't get a retest later, but a hated rally for a time makes the most sense here. What do you think?

• 1:27:22David Hoffman?

  So he is quote retweeting DC investor who is saying, I'd prefer if no one really trusted this rally. So people are going back and forth and like, all right, like Ether is up, like a couple hundred dollars, Bitcoin's up a couple thousand dollars. Ooh, we're bullish. We're bullish. I'm definitely guilty of this as well.

• 1:27:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's back on, baby.

• 1:27:38David Hoffman?

  But Chris Berninski is saying, if I had to guess, this rally has legs, implying that there's a real movement here. Like people were overly bearish and now that because we stopped going down, people are saying, well, if we're stopping going, if we're gonna stop going down, does that mean we're gonna go up? And that's what is happening. And so Chris is just saying, people were overly bearish. Uh, and so this rally is real.

• 1:28:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Spike up and then a retest. Probably. That's how it's played out in the past. So we were light on the takes this week. So I'm just gonna ask you a question, David, that I'm curious about, because we never discussed this. Um, now that we're in 2023, we can look back and zoom out and reflect on 2022. Um, do you regret it? Would you wipe out the year 2022 in crypto if you could?

• 1:28:24David Hoffman?

  This is very like, deep philosophical question, I think, because like, all right, uh, would you go back and erase World War II? Like, would you go back and erase the Holocaust? Yeah, kill baby Hitler. I might kill baby Hitler. I might do that. But then like if I didn't, I kind of my philosophy on this is like, okay, if I did kill baby Hitler, there would just be another one later, right? Like you actually don't solve the problem. He wasn't the problem. There was a deeper root problem, right? Like there was mob mentality in the 20s and 30s that created the space for that, right?

• 1:28:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so there's a take like from history, which is like, um, look, uh, it wasn't ever, something like that was inevitable. I mean, the shape of it was definitely shaped by the person, but there's some inevitability about the lesson that people need to learn at that time, something like this.

• 1:29:13David Hoffman?

  So like, who was the biggest villain of 2022? It was like SBF, right? So would I delete FTX and SBF? Well, like, sure, but then it would just create like, it would just leave the door open for a different person to do the same exact thing, right? And so humans, we learn through pain. If everyone is feeling very in, uh, has a mindset of pain right now and loss, because a lot of their hard earned money is now worth a lot less. Like this is a lesson that you are now going to learn. And if we didn't learn this as an industry in 2022, then we were just going to learn it at a different time. And maybe it would actually be even more painful. And so I'm not really one to say that like 2022 brought nothing of

• 1:29:55David Hoffman?

  value. It definitely brought hardship. Um, you know, that meme of like, good times, uh, hard times breed, breed, strong people, strong people produce good times, good times produce weak people, weak people produce hard times. I just see us going through that cycle and you can't skip forward in that cycle. Like you have to experience for better or for worse, all parts of it.

• 1:30:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree with that. I just don't have a dissenting opinion on that. I think 2022 needed to happen. It was ultimately, it was, uh, it was healthy. It's going to be good for us. Uh, long term, we have to kind of zoom out and, um, with all of this stuff, you have to take the, uh, the bad with the good. Um, I, I just look at the way we were entering 2023 and I contrast that with the way we entered 2022. And, uh, the way we entered 2022 was very, very deeply fundamentally unhealthy. It felt like kind of a

• 1:30:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just a different kind of community that was not in touch with the utility it was providing to the world and was not in touch with its core values. And I feel coming into 2023, like we've restored some of that. Yeah, it's more quiet. Yeah, we don't have the kind of the mainstream attention, but guess what? We haven't deserved it yet. We're still in the like the early years of this decade. So let's go and earn it. So I'm actually happy that 2022 happened. It's, you know, unfortunate. A lot of people got hurt. If you could win these lessons without that, I mean, that would be amazing. But I just don't think life works like that. At least, yeah, I just, I've always learned through my mistakes and through like, you know,

• 1:31:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  kind of problems, as long as they're not catastrophic, then then we can kind of learn and rebuild and move on and be stronger. So yeah, I agree with you. I didn't know what your take would be, though, but that's, it's interesting that that's what it is.

• 1:31:48David Hoffman?

  So the only thing I want to add on to this is, is this should always be a moment of reflection, like bull markets make people think and do things and become a different person. Everyone's a different person in the middle of a manic bull market. And so you should think about how did that bull market change you as an investor, as a, as a person, as a character? How did it change your personality? And how perhaps did that impact your decisions to buy or sell? Like, did you, did you FOMO into that NFT? You should have a self reflective moment as to like, how did that impact me? Because we are going to do it again. And if you are not in more deeper touch with yourself that because of this last bull market that we

• 1:32:31David Hoffman?

  went through, you perhaps will make the same exact mistakes that you made last bull cycle. So that'll be my one, my one message about that.

• 1:32:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, man. So what are you bullish on this week, David?

• 1:32:41David Hoffman?

  Well, this is gonna be a moment where I'm glad that I'm going first because I know that you and I are bullish.

• 1:32:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You took mine, didn't you?

• 1:32:46David Hoffman?

  The same thing, yeah. So we just recorded this episode with Wayne from Spruce ID, which is the organization working on the Sign In with Ethereum standard. It was a good episode, a really, really good episode. I think it's gonna be one of these episodes that like embeds itself into listeners' brains. They're probably gonna be thinking about it for a very long time about its implications. And they're going to realize that they are here for the tech. Because I think the best take out of that, that episode is that Google, Facebook, Apple are just banks for our identity and our data. So there's, you got the banks of TradFi, but the banks of Silicon are banks for your data and your identity.

• 1:33:27David Hoffman?

  And this has all been a part of the grand crypto vision, first money, then identity.

• 1:33:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look, you took mine, so I'm just gonna plus one that.

• 1:33:37David Hoffman?

  I know, I did, I'm sorry.

• 1:33:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  But look, our brains are in sync on this. I, I think we, we both feel that the time of, like for identity, for decentralized identity is like, is here. It's just like firing up. It's like, it's like 2016 again. The birth of Ethereum and smart contracts and programmable money. Now we have this decentralized programmable identity type of primitive taking hold. And I, I feel strongly, David, that like identity could be just as important, just as profound, if not maybe in some ways more profound than, than money, than taking back money. And this is a technology that I think I, I support. I believe it's, it's net good for, for the world.

• 1:34:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's nice about this too is the Sign In with Ethereum, there's no bags to shell, there's no token, alright? And like, how can anybody be mad about this external to crypto? It's literally a net good created, it's a public good created as a byproduct of the existence of Ethereum. If Ethereum didn't exist, I don't think we could have a decentralized identity tool like Sign In with Ethereum. And if, by the way, you don't know what we're talking about right now at this point, why this is so great, or why David and I are so excited about it, stay tuned for that episode. I think it's coming out not next week. Next week is Tyler Cowen on Monday, but the week after, I think is when we have this slated, David?

• 1:35:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but it'll be next week for Bankless Premium subscribers who get the early release.

• 1:35:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. And yeah, you you tell us if you think it's as important as an episode and a topic as we do. So David, meme of the week. What do we got this week?

• 1:35:14David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week, meme of the week. I saw this one on Twitter. We might have actually done this meme before. I think we have, but since it was CPI print day today, we're bringing this meme back. And it's the meme of the chat human looking at a monkey. The chat human is saying, you're such a dumb animal. And then the monkey responds, you're waiting for the Fed to tell you how much your how much value your anti establishment digital currency will lose. Like, oh, yeah, we are kind of doing that.

• 1:35:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are subject to the gravitational forces of the Fed, aren't we?

• 1:35:43David Hoffman?

  But that's the system we're trying to disrupt. We're just not there yet.

• 1:35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we got a long way to go. Stay tuned for the moment of Zen this week, by the way.

• 1:35:51David Hoffman?

  Great moment of Zen. If you are listening to this on the podcast, it's a good song, but it is an even greater video. So definitely watch it on Twitter, which is where it's hosted. And that's that.

• 1:36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I'll end as I always do. Risks and disclaimers, of course, crypto is risky. So is DeFi. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  Flip punks, then the punks flip flops. Disappointing mood, burdened as rewards. But we said GM, we said GM. We allowed this metal was all over the place. Taxes made us wanna jump in a lake. Mini came back, but we said no worries. Then we said GM, we said GM. GM, we said. We said GM to our friends. We said, GM, GM, GM, GM, GM.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  Ethereum merged, Vitalik's bulge. AI, large patchy penguins burned, but they rose from the ashes like a phoenix. So the name became, man boobs a game. Chaos reign, DeFi saved the day. And when we say GM, you know we mean it. When we say GM, you know we mean it. Big red candles and heart attacks. Capitulate forced to sell our stacks. To all the fat fingers and the hacks. We said GM, we said GM. You don't need help when the dominant trend is up and coming, right? Like a hamster and.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  If some things go wrong, you need a friend. And so we say GM, yeah, we say GM. GM, we said. We said GM to our friends. We said, GM, GM, GM, GM, GM.